10 Movies With Ant-Sized Characters You Have To See

Having taken a look at all of these movies, does Ant-Man show any influence? It definitely does, and a lot of the classic tropes of the small person in a big environment genre are played on in really effective ways. But the movie adds so much more to the table, not just relying on the same things you’ve seen for the past 80 years of film.

There isn’t the cliche scene you might expect where Scott Lang runs into a giant cat or dog, although the film obviously employs that kind of thing with the ants that Scott can ride like horses. It makes use of the common environment suddenly becoming very unfamiliar, as in the first shrinking scene where Scott finds himself stuck in his now massive bathtub and the water is super dangerous, reminiscent of the sprinklers in Honey I Shrunk The Kids.

But in many scenes, Ant-Man takes the spirit of this trope and adds even more to it that you’re constantly surprised nobody’s ever thought of, such as an amazing sequence that takes place all inside a briefcase. Peyton Reed brilliantly combines both the heist genre and the shrinking genre, two stories that have become well-worn over time, but adding in the Marvel charm results in one of the studio's best films yet.